LITTLE ROCK — Nearly a decade in the works, a new Target is set to open Oct. 10 in central Little Rock. The store will anchor the new Park Avenue multi-use development on the site of the demolished University Mall north of Interstate 630 on University Avenue. Park Avenue is on one of the state’s most central, and prime, pieces of property. With its potential as a residential, shopping and entertainment area, and as an arboreal island in a sea of metal and concrete, this development could be that Arkansas rarity: an urban open-air commercial and social hub accessible to drivers, bikers and pedestrians alike.
Park Avenue also represents one of Little Rock's first major shopping centers built east of Interstate 430 and north of 12th Street in decades. In the 1990s and 2000s, shopping centers sprang up along Chenal Parkway and at Pleasant Ridge Town Center, Shackleford Crossings and The Promenade at Chenal. “It is so much easier for developers to go out west to buy raw land,” City Director Stacy Hurst said. “It's cheaper. It’s easier. Redevelopment is just more difficult." City leaders hope that Park Avenue's opening unleashes a wave of momentum to the revitalizing efforts not only in Midtown, but the adjacent War Memorial Park area as well as the 12th Street Corridor and the University District around the University of Arkansas at Little Rock to its south.
This Target will be a general merchandise PFresh store, which includes an open-market grocery layout with vegetables, fruits, meats and a bakery. The one-story store will be 137,000 square feet, Target spokesman Jenna Reck said. The development also is to include restaurants, apartments and possibly a movie theater, but Strode Property Co. of Dallas, the developer, had not announced other tenants at press time. Indeed, it’s become something of a local parlor game to guess what else will go in at Park Avenue besides Target. A Barnes and Noble? A Borders? No and No. Representatives from both bookstore chains said their companies didn’t plan to open in Park Avenue.
Across from the new Target on University Avenue, banners showcase the logo for Midtown, which has the teeming intersection of West Markham Street and University Avenue as its epicenter. The city put up the 14 banners this spring using the streetscaping portion — $2,000 to $4,000 worth — of a federal project that widened some of University Avenue from four to six lanes, said Walter Malone, Little Rock’s planning manager. City officials sent out drafts of the banner's initial design for review by property owners to the east — in Hillcrest — and to the west — in Briarwood. It was an attempt to "reach out" and promote a sense of shared community for parts of the city that are separated by the massively pedestrian-unfriendly University Avenue.
City leaders agree Midtown's future is inextricably tied to the development of the 202-acre War Memorial Park to its east. The more attractive and useful the park — best known as home to War Memorial Stadium, the Little Rock Zoo, and what’s left of decaying Ray Winder Field as well as an 18-hole public golf course — the more likely people will want to live in Midtown.
As work begins on pedestrian and bike paths in the park this summer, the possibility of such paths as a conduit to Park Avenue arises. The paths, if safe and well-lit, could prove very popular, drawing residents from the 12th Street Corridor, Stifft Station, Hillcrest, the Heights and from Riverdale via Allsopp Park. Imagine fathers porting babies in back carriers, mothers pushing jogging strollers, and bikers with Target bags fit snugly in their panniers weaving between them all as the city inches closer to a Mid-South New Urbanite ideal.
City officials laud a possibly pedestrian-friendly War Memorial Park and Midtown as a boon to residents of all income levels. Additionally, Park Avenue should create hundreds of jobs and generate millions of dollars of sales and property tax. The project's roots extend to at least 2001, when a far less rosy fate seemed to await the 27 acres south of West Markham Street.
Problems
University Mall, built in 1967 as Little Rock’s first enclosed shopping center, was dying. Development in west Little Rock had taken away shoppers from the 542,000-square-foot mall. Plummeting business and deteriorating conditions drove away tenants. In the late 1990s, Montgomery Ward, one of three anchor stores, left when the national company went bankrupt. J.C. Penney and M.M. Cohn remained as anchors — major retailers that provide hefty rent payments and draw enough shoppers to support other tenants.
In 1993, University Mall appraised at $46 million. By 2001, it had dropped to $18,747,000, according to tax records reported by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The outlook also looked bleak for Park Plaza, a mall just north of West Markham Street along University Avenue. Some worried that Park Plaza, despite its vigorous business, was jeopardized by plans for a new megamall in west Little Rock. In early April, Little Rock directors approved the Summit Mall, tagged at $150 million and 1.1-million square feet. Summit Mall was to be located just south of the intersection of I-430 and Shackleford Road.
Also that April, the city hired a nine-member panel of planners and developers from across the country to study how to redevelop central Little Rock if Summit Mall was built. These consultants, working for the nonprofit Urban Land Institute, wrote a report that has since become something of a North Star for Midtown's redevelopment leaders. The institute’s experts concluded that Summit Mall would kill University Mall and possibly Park Plaza. They pointed out that the "cluttered" appearance of various types of buildings along University Avenue and West Markham Street stifled a coherent sense of place. Then, they offered advice to stave off the area's demise.
Midtown needed: district identity, resolution of automobile and pedestrian conflicts, establishment of a "cohesive streetscape" and creation of a gathering place. They recommended demolishing University Mall, and building a new version to include a megaplex movie theater, a garden/hobby store, bookstore, grocery store and restaurants, plus some offices and multifamily housing with open space. Target was mentioned as an anchor candidate.
Over its weeklong stay in Little Rock, the panel also advised the city designate the Midtown area as a development district, which would allow business owners to apply for state grants, and devise a master plan to pursue "higher-quality commercial, retail, and residential development and public improvements" in the district. Naturally, someone was needed to make it all happen.
Solutions
In December 2003, the city created the Midtown Redevelopment District No. 1 Advisory Board to continue the efforts of an earlier task force made up of property owners, planners and developers. That task force had helped push legislation to establish the area as a redevelopment district, which defined design concepts and allowed developers to face fewer bureaucratic impediments.
The Midtown Advisory Board defined the boundaries of the midtown redevelopment district as "all parcels within the area bounded by Interstate 630 on the south and Father Tribou Street to the north from McKinley Street on the west to University Avenue on the east; as well as the area bounded by Lee Avenue on the north and Markham Street on the south from University Avenue east to Fillmore Street on the east."
By 2006, the board's focus had narrowed to the future of University Mall. In 2002, litigation involving city permit lapses seriously hampered prospects for the Summit Mall; the project was canceled two years later, and Park Plaza stayed in business. Midtowne Little Rock opened in 2006 as a shopping center north of West Markham Street and across from Park Plaza, replete with the kind of "lifestyle retailers" recommended for that spot in the Urban Land Institute report. Meanwhile, the languishing University Mall, only 38-percent occupied and featured on deadmalls.com, was still kicking in the news.
A multiyear legal battle had sprung up between the property's manager, Simon Property Group Inc., and the owners, the William L. Patton Jr. Family Limited Partnership and the Southern Real Estate & Financial Co., who were pushing for $15 million in work on the mall to make it “tenantable.” Instead, in late 2006, Simon representatives suggested razing the 27-acre plot of land and rebuilding it as a mixed-use facility.
In the midst of this, the Midtown Advisory Board released “A Statement of Design and Programming Expectations for the Redevelopment of the University Mall,” which provided a set of design and development standards for the area as the Urban Land Institute study had suggested.
The board's standards encouraged: attractive and usable pedestrian routes in public right-of-ways; parking accommodated in small lots or in structures; underground utilities; buildings with interesting entries, wall articulations and roof lines — in other words, no faceless big boxes; rich landscaping; and tighter restrictions on signs and lighting.
Pursuing a cohesive neighborhood aesthetic has driven the board when dealing with matters not directly related to Park Avenue. Malone recalled that engineers, as they widened the street, wanted to build the walls east of University Avenue between West Markham and I-630 with only solid concrete. But representatives of the Midtown Advisory Board shared their concerns over appearance with the engineers, and were able to agree on a split-rock pattern and planting plants to “soften” the wall's look.
When it came to the new Target, city officials weren't able to get everything they wanted. They sought only multi-story buildings to fill Park Avenue, but Target representatives told the board that building a multi-story store at Park Avenue wouldn't be justified by Little Rock's population density, said Hurst, who represents Ward 3 on the Board of Directors and serves on the advisory board. Ward 3 includes Midtown. A December 2006 Democrat-Gazette article reported that the initial investment to install special escalators for shopping carts at one of the multi-story Target stores is about $3 million — plus an additional $1 million in operating costs every year.
The board also allowed Target to have a 384-space open surface parking lot, but it will be supplemented by a renovated parking deck left over from the University Mall, Hurst added. Strode Property, also Midtowne Little Rock’s developer, has released a blueprint for its 753,400-square-foot Park Avenue development.
It shows parking lots will cover 387,400 square feet while open space will cover 43,400 square feet.
What's Next
There are still plenty of questions about which companies besides Target may occupy Park Avenue. (Multiple messages left for Strode Property were not returned.) The architects have designed a "main street" layout on an east-west axis, with multiple shops on either side of a central street. That part of the development will be similar to the Shackleford Crossings shopping center that opened in 2008, Malone said. But Park Avenue’s shops will be multi-story instead of single-story, he added.
The plan is for apartments (350 units) and a hotel to be situated at the development's northwest and southeast corners. These may prove attractive to health-care professionals and their patients, as Baptist Health Medical Center, St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Arkansas Children's Hospital and John L. McClellan Memorial Veterans Hospital are all located within a couple of miles of the location.
Malone said that there are no specific plans to connect pedestrians from St. Vincent Medical Center to Park Avenue. But brainstorming has produced one possibility: an elevated crosswalk stretching from St. Vincent's Guesthouse Inn over University Avenue to the apartments planned at the southeast corner of Park Avenue (at the former location of the Montgomery Ward auto center). He said that an overpass could be built there extending straight across from the hotel's entrance, which would make its usage more likely. “Typically the problem with getting people to use pedestrian overpasses,” he said, “is that they have to go up, go over and come back down.”
A pedestrian overpass would help improve what has long been considered one of the Midtown area's chief drawbacks: insularity. "The neighborhoods to the north orient toward Kavanaugh, while the I-630 corridor is a barrier to much interaction from the south," Baker Kurrus, one of the advisory board's seven members serving three-year terms, wrote in an e-mail. Kurrus is the lone representative of the Little Rock School Board, as mandated by the advisory board. Four local business owners, a local resident and a representative of the Little Rock Planning Commission are also appointed.
Kurrus, who emphasized his personal opinions do not represent the advisory board as a whole, said he felt keys to triggering Midtown's redevelopment included providing more quality, affordable residences, and building more interaction between War Memorial Park and the facilities and neighborhoods around it. "You have, within the general area of the park, a large stadium, a medical school, a golf course, a blood donation center, a zoo, a health club, a military installation, and a minimum security prison. These uses are not completely incompatible, but nobody would say they were part of a comprehensive plan of development," he said. Meanwhile, "Park Plaza Mall is a destination area which was designed to stand alone, as was the old University Mall. The challenge now is to tie all of these seemingly incompatible, insular properties into something that has a sense of place, a sense of community, and a sense of excitement."
Buzz is building around changes at War Memorial Park. Two holes of the golf course have been moved to accommodate an expanded children's playground, while the Walker tennis courts have been leveled. That land is ready to be sodded to provide more green space, said Truman Tolefree, director of Little Rock Parks and Recreation. Workers are grading some of the golf course to prepare for a mile-long, 15-foot-wide loop to be built next spring along Coleman Creek west of Fair Park Boulevard, Tolefree said. A children's library, planned for the park's southern edge, between I-630 and West Tenth Street and between Madison and Jonesboro streets, should unleash pedestrian flow from the library to the areas north, Kurrus said.
Plans to build paths south of St. Vincent Medical Center to connect pedestrians and bikers between War Memorial Park and Park Avenue are "very preliminary,” Tolefree said. No routes have yet been drawn, but it's a direction the city wants to go, he added. "I would love to link St. Vincent’s and the Park Avenue development to the park," Hurst said. "But these things take money."
Regardless of how visitors get to Park Avenue, there will likely be plenty of them. "The superblock that the University Mall sat on ... has historically been the hub of retail for the state of Arkansas," Hurst said. The chance to redevelop such a site "comes along once in generation, really. It's a very significant project for the city."